The document discusses governance models for content management systems (CMS). It defines governance as the policies, roles, responsibilities and processes that guide how a CMS is used to achieve business goals. It emphasizes aligning the right people in the right roles, including an executive sponsor, web steering team, and web team. The roles and responsibilities of each group are outlined. It also discusses considerations for extranets and tips for effective content governance, such as permission models, workflows and guidelines.

1. Defining a Governance Model
Intranets, Extranets & Websites
Toronto | Ottawa | Calgary | Regina | New York 1

2. What is (CMS) governance?
Ask 20 people, get 20 answers.
1. A set of policies, roles, responsibilities and
processes to guide, direct and control how
your CMS is used to accomplish business
goals
2. A set of workflows and permissions implemented in
your CMS
3. The authoritative administrative structures that set
policy and standards for Web product management
2

3. Don‟t forget why you implemented a
CMS (and a website) in the first place!
Common reasons
1. To remove the IT bottleneck
2. To empower distributed content authors to
manage their own content
3. To enforce standards across your web properties
4. To automate processes for greater efficiency
5. To manage web content as a proper digital asset
and your website as a proper channel
3

4. A thought experiment
4

5. The Problem
Two different departments
have critical events
happening at the same time
and both want to be on the
homepage. There‟s not
enough room.
Who decides what goes on
the homepage?
5

6. The Problem
You are considering changing
the way you label navigation
on your website.
Who is responsible for
looking at search analytics to
determine the vocabulary
your visitors actually use?
6

7. The Problem
There is a clear business case
for a new faceted search
engine.
It will benefit almost every
group that produces content in
the organization.
What budget does it come
from? Who authorizes the
purchase?
7

8. The Problem
The number of online
registrations has dropped by
25%. (Increasing
registrations is a key
objective of the website)
Who reacts?
8

9. The Problem
A series of untrue, near-
slanderous blog posts are
made about your
organization and retweeted.
Who is responsible for
knowing this is happening?
Who decides how to
respond?
9

10. What can we do?
Today, I hope to …
1. Draw a bigger circle around WCM governance
that goes beyond workflows and permissions
2. Provide you some helpful examples for aligning
the right people in the right place(s)
3. Offer some suggestions for the tough questions
10

11. What happens if you don‟t put
“good” governance in place?
• Messy, uncontrolled growth of content
• Organizational conflict
• Poor adoption and resistance to change
• Operational inefficiency
• Loss of credibility
• Risk of litigation
11

12. Typical governance FAIL
• No senior champion
• Project is an IT-driven initiative
• Web team has limited budget and power
• No consideration for change management
• No plan or vision
• Assuming the technology will handle everything
• Greatest barrier to success = politics
• Greatest key to success = senior champion 12

13. Recap: what types of
governance models exist?
• Decentralized (common in larger orgs)
• No single owner
• Driven by policies and guidelines
• Organic growth, sometimes leading to site sprawl
• Centralized (common in smaller orgs)
• Single owner/department
• Bureaucratic
• Highly controlled
13

14. What types of governance
models exist?
• Collaborative
• Executive champion
• Steering committee / council
• Decentralized content ownership
• Centralized platform
14

15. But first…consider the
complexities of the modern
corporate website
15

16. Content and website lifecycle
“Web engagement management” – personalization, marketing
automation, content profiling
Content sharing/integration with business systems (CRM, DAM, intranet)
Extranet functionality/social and user-generated content
Analytics and key performance indicators
Multiple channels (RSS, mobile)
Global taxonomy
Base web content
16

17. Executive
sponsor
Web steering
team
Web team
Content
authors
A collaborative WCM governance
model for a large, distributed
organization
17

18. The executive team/sponsor
Roles and responsibilities
1. Defining the overall strategy and priorities for the
website.
2. Allocation of funds
3. Ensuring that the right people are in the right positions
for online success
4. Reviewing and approving brand guidelines
5. Sets high-level policies
6. Acting as a the final authority for resolving conflicts
18

19. A committed sponsor
• Doesn‟t just sign the cheque
• Takes responsibility for the project
• Wants to see the project succeed
• Is fully informed and educated on the project
19

20. Some tips
• The business case should sell itself
• Education is key
• Provide the sponsor with ongoing status and goal
updates
• Do not hide shortcomings
• Consider quick wins to show immediate value and
maintain support
20

21. The web steering team
Advice:the Internet Strategy Forum (2009)
1. The role of internal online strategist has shifted:
more than 60% of such positions are within two
levels of the CEO
2. The importance of the internet is growing in
many organizations – the introduction of senior
executive roles responsible for online execution
3. Recommendation: Create a separate Internet
strategic management function (do not force into
IT or marketing as they exist)
21

22. The web steering team
Roles and responsibilities
1. Resolve questions of conflicting priorities based on
objectives set by ES
2. Brand enforcement - has power to deny proposals
3. Define internal and external content; create policies
on content lifecycle
4. Coordinate activities, reducing duplication
5. Decide how best to address new regulatory or
legislative requirements
6. Review metrics and using these to drive decisions
22

23. The web steering team
Committees and membership
1. Break down role into multiple committees
reporting to the WST
2. Members may be VP-level or middle
management – ensure a decisions are made in an
effective and timely manner
3. Members should represent a healthy cross-
section of departments with an interest in the
website >> recall the website layer cake!
23

24. The web team
Roles and responsibilities
1. Undertake ongoing analysis of user behaviour and
report on this behaviour to ES and WST
2. Content approval, workflow and permissions
decisions
3. Provide training and support to content creators
4. Monitor and tune the site search engine
5. Implement search engine optimization tactics
6. Staying on the “cutting edge” as appropriate
24

25. Knowledge half-life
• The half life of knowledge in a given field is how
long it takes for half of industry current expertise
to become irrelevant or incorrect
Industry Knowledge Half-Life
Mechanical Engineering 20 years
Medicine 10 years
Traditional Marketing 7 years
Internet Marketing 3 years
Social Media Marketing 1 year or less
25

26. Content contributors
Roles and responsibilities
1. Creation and editing of content
2. Entry of content into WCM
26

27. Competencies for online success
Education
& Technology
Mentoring
Content Strategy &
Creation Direction
Social
Outreach
Media
27

28. Map competency tasks to teams
Web team Web Steering Executive External
Team Team expertise
Technology
Support of daily X
operations
New technology X
deployments
Business analysis X
28

29. Content governance: Where
the rubber hits the road
29

30. Effective CMS content
governance
• Flows naturally from people alignment
• Provides the right balance of guidance and
empowerment
• Is key to a successful CMS deployment
30

31. Key ingredients: your content
governance plan
• Owned by web team.
• Build an authorship model
This determines who will be allowed to create and edit content for
each area of the site, including tagging, personalization and forms
• Create an authorization and permission model
Documents the types of users and their access privileges – including
those administering ongoing business functions such as A|B testing
and analytics reporting. Can be as granular as text editor buttons.
31

32. More ingredients
• Develop a workflow model
Content approval prior to publishing, including user-generated and
social content.
• Publication strategy
How frequently content will be published to the live web server, how
exceptions will be handled and who can accelerate publishing
• Define an archiving strategy
When and how is content removed from the site? What freshness
checks can be put in place?
32

33. What about extranets?
33

34. Extranet user management
• An entirely separate set of permissions and workflows
• Often requires business input:
• channel relationships (clients, partners, constituents)
• business system/portal integration (e-commerce, account management
systems)
• Ensure your web steering team has adequate
representation from these stakeholders
• Ensure your web team has the right skillsets and
enough resources to manage these elements
34

35. Extranet community
• May or may not allow subsite/feature provisioning
• Communities, blogs, forums
• If so, lean towards an intranet governance model
• Add a community manager or curator to your web
team.
• They will need extra support if user-generated content is to be
closely monitored.
35

36. Advice from the trenches

37. Advice from the trenches
• Align your people BEFORE your implementation
starts!
• Before technical planning
• Before information architecture
• Maybe even before web strategy
• If you‟ve already got a mess on your hands…
• All the more reason. Decision-making structure should be
crystal clear when wading through a mess.
37

38. Advice from the trenches
• Prepare people for governance sessions
• Use your information architecture
• When in doubt, keep it simple.
• Educate people on CMS concepts:
workflow, permissions, publication and other content-related
processes.
38

39. The Colouring Exercise
Homepage
Press
About Us Products
Room
Press
History Widget
Releases
Philosophy Doodad Videos
Careers Thingy
39

40. Children (and adults) like
boundaries
• Give people clear guidelines
• Alignment with brand and company messaging
• What's considered inappropriate and what's okay to share
• How people read and scan web content
• Visual design guidance – restricting # words
• Search engine optimization principles
• Your CMS can help you here…
• Build in help text and guidelines on every field
40

41. Supplementary skillsets can
help too…
• The web is a distinct and unique medium –
consider adding a content strategist to your
team
• What is a content strategist?
• Rachel Lovinger: A content strategist is a [role] with specialized
focus on using words and data to create unambiguous content
that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.
• Can play an important role in content lifecycle
41

42. How to encourage adoption
• Engage evangelists and spread the word
• Training – people fear the unknown
• Support structure
• Involve users as early as possible
• People will change if the change is worthwhile
• Restrict as much as possible, within reason
42

43. Act it out
Workshop – 20 minutes duration
1. Select some small object to represent a piece of
content
2. Choose individuals or teams to represent ownership
within the website
3. Act out a process from start to end, including all
approval steps and exchanges of information
4. Repeat until your point is made
43

44. Sketch it out
Visual is powerful
1. Creating simple pictures is an incredibly powerful
way to discover ideas and solve problems
2. Get everyone up to the whiteboard!
3. Very effective in sessions where team members
sketched out their ideal homepage
Credit: Dan Roam 44

45. Use some persuasion
Human Behaviour 101
1. One of the best ways to get people to do
something? Turn it into a game and add some
competition. We just can‟t resist.
2. 50 insights into human behaviour that can be
applied not only to web design, but also to
business processes.
3. Getmentalnotes.com (Stephen Anderson)
45

46. The $100 Game
Activity: Around 20 minutes
1. You are provided with a list of priorities and $100
to „spend‟.
2. Distribute the money across the priorities
according to how important those features.
3. Explain and defend why you have divided your
money in this way.
46

47. The Problem
You are considering changing
the way you label navigation
on your website.
Who is responsible for
looking at search analytics to
determine the vocabulary
your visitors actually use?
47

48. A good answer
• The web team is responsible for monitoring
analytics and reporting findings to the web
steering team.
48

49. The Problem
Two different departments
have critical events
happening at the same time
and both want to be on the
homepage. There‟s not
enough room.
Who makes this decision?
49

50. A good answer
• The web steering team makes the call.
• Does not need to be escalated to the executive team unless
absolutely necessary
50

51. The Problem
There is a clear business case
for a new faceted search
engine.
It will benefit almost every
group that produces content in
the organization.
What budget does it come
from? Who authorizes the
purchase?
51

52. A good answer
• The executive team makes the funding decision
and allocates budget as required.
52

53. The Problem
The number of online
registrations has dropped by
25%. (Increasing
registrations is a key
objective of the website)
Who reacts?
53

54. A good answer
• The executive team pays attention to this and
imposes an appropriate strategy and reaction
chain through the steering and web teams
54

55. The Problem
A series of untrue, near-
slanderous blog posts are
made about your
organization and retweeted.
Who is responsible for
knowing this is happening?
Who decides how to
respond?
55

56. A good answer
• Marketing and/or communications might take
responsibility for this
• Social media monitoring
56

57. Social Media Response Matrix
Created by non~linear creations, December 2009
Monitoring Active Channels Neutral Channels Closed Channels
Upon discovering a comment -Twitter - Blogs
about the initiative, first - Facebook
- YouTube - Open Forums - MySpace
determine the channel: - Flickr -Closed Forums
Is comment positive / neutral? Monitor
(See Notes)
Is this person in your Y
network? Y
(Twitter follower, Is it something you can Y
YouTube subscriber, N respond to? Let Stand
Flickr contact) N (See Notes)
Is the comment off-topic for them
Y
Network Pipeline
or clearly just meant to
antagonize?
Evaluation
N
Actions
N Concur, Add or Thank
Is it a rage piece? Are they venting
Y (See Notes)
or ranting without a cohesive
Check their stream. Do N argument?
they post a lot about N
related topics? Is there a factual error? Is the Y
comment misguided but rational? Fix
(See Notes)
N
Does the commenter have a
Y Y
specific concern or issue that can
be addressed?
N Reach Out
Invite them to connect Is it something you can otherwise (See Notes)
Y
respond to?
N

58. Takeaways
• Invest in people alignment
• It’s worth the time, effort and expense
• There are good and effective ways to structure everyone and
everything for online success
• Form teams spanning traditional silos
• IT should not drive CMS initiatives
• Ensure your governance model spans the website
“layer cake”
• There is much more than just web content to consider
58

59. Add NLC closing slides
59